In June 2013 Peter Francis, a former Metropolitan police officer, broke a 20-year silence about the role he had played in surveilling the family of Stephen Lawrence in a documentary jointly made by the Guardian and Channel 4’s Dispatches programme. Two years later, thanks in part to the programme, the Home Office established an undercover policing inquiry, commonly known as the spycops public inquiry, to shed light on the scale of surveillance of activists and trade unionists. That inquiry is now under threat.

Francis had served in the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), a Met unit founded in 1968 whose officers lived for years at a time inside political and campaigning organisations under false names.

In the months after Stephen Lawrence’s murder in 1993 Francis had been deployed to pose as an anti-racist campaigner. His superiors pressed him to find “dirt” that could be used against the Lawrence family and their supporters. Stephen’s mother, Doreen, told the Guardian and Channel 4 that nothing she had heard since her son died had topped the revelation that police had been spying on her while she grieved. She had always suspected the police were watching. She never had proof.

The Lawrences were not an isolated case. Justice campaigns and trade unionists across the country were also........

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